A Season of Unevents
by championrolodexer
Summary: Originally an exercise in asking what happens in Poplar during the South African Christmas Special. But let's do other Christmases too. Canon divergent from Season 6 onwards. Guaranteed angst-free.
1. Chapter 1

**Christmas 1961**

Nothing happens. Nothing worth talking about – so why mention it?

The first thing that doesn't happen: Patsy doesn't go to South Africa.

Perhaps it's the case that she's tied here, Delia worries. Sister Julienne thinks that Patsy will want to be here, primed and ready to assume responsibility if Delia should have a relapse (it won't happen; Delia's been fine for ages). Patsy insists she doesn't want to go, never put her name forward for it, even though Nurse Crane suggested that her formidable talents would come in very handy. She would much rather say here. But not out of any sort of duty or sense of obligation that Delia should worry about. She's not a good sailor. Not good is an understatement.

But wouldn't she like – Delia supposes – to go for a walk beneath the big broad skies of the southern hemisphere. To be ambling out of the clinic just as the twilight sets in, to find – what – a herd of wildebeest, grazing on the savannah in front of her? (Delia would be the first to admit that her knowledge of the particular flora and fauna of that corner of the world is rather lacking. Patsy could have gone, and reported back.) For that scene, you could put up with the discomfort of a little maritime nausea.

It's not that Delia thinks it will be a lovely jaunt. Sister Julienne has made it sound hard, and it will be hard, it will be graft. But there's a hardness – of a different kind - here in London too. It's not a holiday to remain.

Patsy insists she has no interest in setting out for a land she's never seen.

She's rather explore that undiscovered country, and move about the contours that make up Delia's body. To envisage how she can persuade that landscape to give up its secrets. Only that metaphor strikes rather awkwardly. There's something violent and aggressive about it. Like the land or the body is a territory to be claimed, waiting for you to impress your imprint on, the stamp of ownership. Something to be taken, rather than invited into. Something dominating rather than…reciprocal.

So Patsy rethinks the analogy. More like getting to know the map of Poplar then. A landscape that becomes more familiar with each day, one she knows, one she can inhabit without fear or self-consciousness. A landscape opens up before her because she knows how to speak to it. It is not a place she can demand things of, only a place she can work with.

Delia blushes. And then objects. Much as she likes the place, and has made her peace with the frustrations and surprising delights of Poplar, Patsy is truly terrible at flattery.

Patsy rethinks. And then decides to drop the analogy completely. Comparing bodies to other things, or disputing the extent to which something else takes on the quality of flesh – isn't that the kind of thing that Luther got in trouble for? The humanness of a little communion wafer has been a tussle between the churches for several centuries. Best to leave it alone. The comparison, that is, not the body. Delia agrees, entirely.

* * *

They make a list of things that will probably happen while nothing is happening here.

One. Phyllis and Fred will argue over the repair of a car that belongs to the clinic. No, a truck. No, a motorbike. They embody two very different approaches to vehicle maintenance.

Two. Trixie will pretend to be horrified at their living conditions, the heat and the perspiration and the fact her make-up won't fix. She'll do that because she thinks people are expecting her to say something about keeping beautiful in foreign climes. She'll take less than a day to forget to pretend be annoyed about this, to roll up her sleeves. She won't have packed sleeves, of course.

Three. Tom will probably – this is more of a guess – pick the least opportune moment to propose to Barbara. At the moment of a sudden crisis, just as something vital breaks down or something else equally vital runs out. Delia can see that coming, it's on the cards. Patsy is more unsure.

It is comfortingly predictable. The two of them will have to work to pretend to be surprised when they all return and unfold the stories that Delia and Patsy have already predicted. All these things will happen – out there. Nothing happens here at all. Patsy and Delia will have nothing to report at a homecoming bursting with stories.

* * *

It's Sister Monica Joan whom they assume will be huffy about not being taken along. And slightly wounded too, perhaps. It's the right decision, no doubt about it. But what underlines age and infirmity more than the unspoken non-invitation?

Sister Monica Joan has no cares about it whatsoever. Who knows what travelling she did in another life, before this?

Where she'd like to go, though, is the western coast of Scotland. The isle of Iona, but up and down too, into each island and inlet and hidden loch. She has been listening to a detective serial on the radio – she hasn't abandoned the radio in favour of the television, not at all. She makes a point of gathering her information about the world from multiple sources. One who relies on a single source for their truth is a fool. And then pauses, and then adds, that scripture is excepted from this point. But even biblical truth is supplemented by biblical archaeology. She's waiting for them, one day soon, to dig up the Holy Grail - so that all shakes out.

It's not the news though, strictly speaking, that she wants the radio for. It's drama, every weeknight at 7.45pm. A mysterious killer is on the loose, and the detective (from Glasgow originally), must track him across the Scottish islands. But the killer is always – at least so far – one step ahead, with a perfectly-devised legend and a charm that allows him to leave dead bodies strewn all along the coast.

This is just an old woman listening to a radio programme – and then recounting each episode to the rest of the house at breakfast. Even though, most of the time, the radio in Sister Monica Joan's room is loud enough for everyone to hear. She doesn't want to miss the quietest aural clue, muttered softly in the background for the benefit of the most attentive listeners.

Another thing that doesn't happen. This is just an old woman listening to a radio programme, so there is nothing really to report.

But this inspires Sister Monica Joan.

Before the lull of the New Year, she devises a game. Sister Mary Cynthia will play, and Delia and Patsy too, obviously. She invites Violet around too, and her nephew, who is visiting over the holiday. And Peter Noakes.

She gives each of them a laboriously written set of cards. Each of them describes a character, some quite outlandish, who have been discovered in a house where a gruesome murder has taken place. They must take on that character, inhabit his or her flesh. Written down on those cards are the things that each of their 'characters' must divulge over the course of the evening, with a note that when questioned on other points they are free to invent what they will, so long as they remain in keeping with the general attitude and orientation appropriate to the backstory. There is guidance on their character's _Weltanschauung_ on a separate card, detailing their career and the seedy parts of their past. Each of them has a seedy part of their past – if only to make real the possibility that each of them might have committed the murder.

With each 'round', Sister Monica Joan, in the guise of grouchy and hard-bitten Glaswegian detective, brings out a newly-discovered clue. The phone used to batter in the head of the victim (poor Mrs Tiverton, elderly society widow); the secret love notes exchanged between Mrs Tiverton's glamorous daughter and the vile American playboy (Peter Noakes). At the end, each of them must guess who has committed the murder. Despite their initial reluctance, they all agree that it has been marvellously well done. Sister Monica Joan has carried off a triumph. She ought to market it.

There's nothing happening here.

* * *

It's Christmas eve, and Mrs Busby calls, from her sister's house – they had a telephone line put in this year. Because it is Christmas, her mam has allowed herself the luxury of twenty minutes on the phone. Delia can hear the sound of her aunt and her aunt's grown-up children in the background, just settling down for a mince pie and something warm as they troop back from church. Her aunt, hovering impatiently in the background, waiting for the household to settle so Christmas proper can begin.

"And", her mother pauses, and then runs through the following sentence very quickly, so the space between the words can scarcely be perceived "say Happy Christmas to Patsy too."

And that's it. Delia sits down, back on the sofa.

Patsy is half asleep, the effects not of a long day, but of assisting Sister Monica Joan with a bottle of sherry. It is traditional to drink it on Christmas eve, apparently. They both suspect that Sister Monica Joan has been inventing a lot of traditions this Christmas, but neither of them will say anything. There's no harm in it – neither of them is at work this evening, or tomorrow. Sister Mary Cynthia has offered to take on the rota for the following day, and Chummy will be at the Maternity Hospital, along with the locum doctor and another nurse whom they don't know, doesn't stay here, but seems perfectly likable. Patsy didn't really argue with Sister Mary Cynthia. There's not much on the books to anticipate, anyway. A distinct slowing down in the birth rate anyway, these past months (the pill? Delia wonders). Maybe too, soon-to-be mothers don't like to interrupt their festive calendars unless they're absolutely sure they're giving birth. There are definitely fewer false alarms at this time of year.

The other tradition that Sister Monica Joan has instituted is that she will not decorate the tree, in memory of Sister Evangelina, and the struggles they used to have over that particular item of yuletide decoration. So it stands there, sparse, in a brightly-lit room. Sister Monica Joan smiles beatifically at it. A reminder of something, the depth of that friendship, that endured as long as anything human can do.

She's also – and Delia supposes it's not really a tradition, not worth reporting on – taken to having her breakfast in a different seat around the table every morning. As if to experiment with where the view is best.

Delia sits down, as close to Patsy as possible. And drapes Patsy's right arm back over her shoulders. It's not heavy, but it's warm. Sister Monica Joan is out for the count, and, besides – she thinks she knows the sister well enough to say this now – this is not the sort of thing that she in her glinting, beady-eyed way, would comment on. She comments on many things, but those are the things that irk her. Her own words. "Affection has never irked me", she said, once, as Sister Winifred offered a solicitous remark about a woman – a school-teacher, respected, prim, unmarried, and nearing thirty, stepping out with a strikingly handsome young man, who wasn't twenty for another month.

Delia drapes Patsy's right arm back over her shoulder, where it was resting before she took the phone call. As she does so, she can hear Patsy's breath catch in her chest. Not with fear about who might be watching. This is something Patsy does every time Delia comes to touch her – a small stutter of surprise and gratitude that Delia should want to. Only Delia can hear it, and she doesn't say anything to Patsy about hearing it. Let Patsy think she continues to exude her usual put-together steeliness. She'll pass on the Christmas wishes from mam tomorrow.

There are two people sitting on a sofa in a warm room. Nothing is happening here – or, for that matter – in a thousand households around Poplar, this Christmas Eve.

Also, too, and just briefly: unremarkable gifts not worth noting. A tree, in a colourful plant pot. Only a small one, and proportionately smaller for Patsy than it is for Delia. Delia suspects it may not even be a pear tree, although the man who sold it to her swore blind it was. Horticulture – she needs Sister Julienne as a guide. The pot she found separately, and re-planted. Delia has also found a little knitted bird, for sale at a Christmas craft market in the Community Hall, to perch in it. She doesn't know what a partridge looks like, and, fortunately, nor does Patsy. Nor does the woman who knitted this lumpy-looking, evil-eyed bird know much about winged creatures in general.

Delia is at pains to emphasise, when she hands it over, just how unremarkable it is. "Only this, mind you. Don't expect two turtledoves tomorrow. My salary won't stretch to expectations like that."

"So there's no hope of three hens in striped jumpers and a beret?"

"Trixie does have a beret, which she has now declared to be out of fashion. That wouldn't be impossible."

Patsy smiles.

"Well, I might offer a compromise then. I'll get you the two calling birds next year, and you can owe me the French hens the year after that. It might take you that long to negotiate with Trixie for the beret. Go on – it will save me the trouble of thinking what to buy for you. You really are very difficult, you know."

Delia, who would probably admit to herself that she sometimes can be difficult, quickly does the mental arithmetic involved here. That's eleven more gifts.

That would take them far away, into almost the middle of the 1970s. An almost unimaginable distance in time, brought to life in a pageant of birds, rings and drummers. And more birds after that. Ah, Delia realises – Patsy is no fool; if they alternate the years, it'll be her, not Patsy who's on the hook for the five gold rings. Still, she assents anyway.

That's eleven more years. But some things endure for that long. Longer, even. The untinseled, unbaubled tree in the corner of the sitting room is a testimony to that.

* * *

 _ **A/N** : Really, BBC, really? You deny me my festive lesbian subplot? Oh, I know, I've fiddled with the timeline._

 _And this is how the Murder Mystery Dinner Party was invented, can't believe it wasn't in the Christmas Special._


	2. 1962

**1962**

It is the middle of November. Plans have to be made.

"Are you quite sure you want to do this?"

"Yes. We agreed! You're not trying to back out on me, are you?"

"No – _no_. It's just – I only wanted to check. It's been almost a year. You might have changed your mind. You might have seen something else you wanted."

"Don't you dare back out of this, Patience Mount. We had an agreement."

Patsy gives a brief sigh. But it is one of resignation, not protest. "Fine. It's agreed."

Delia eyes her, suspicious.

"Really – I only wanted to check before I go off bartering amongst the…bird dealers of the East End."

"Bird dealers?"

"Bird salesmen, birdshop-keepers. The dove…people. Whichever market trader it is one approaches to ask for two turtledoves." Patsy finishes rather wretchedly.

Delia is laughing now, at her distress. The bed shakes. She kisses Patsy's bare shoulder, and then, mindful of the November chill on that pale flesh, pulls the cover back over it.

"Very well, laugh all you like, but you'll explain it to Sister Julienne if she asks why you've turned this room into a giant aviary."

Sister Julienne has more to worry about in this current cold snap than a few innocuously roosting birds. The snap stretches ever longer, threatening to linger, become a meteorological feature. The creaking apparatus of Nonnatus House may not be able to cope with the cold. Fred must lag the pipes more frantically this week.

Not long after their conversation, Patsy steps softly back to the room she shares, still, with Trixie. Somewhere along that short and light-footed journey down the corridor (in socks – it is too cold now for bare feet), she remembers that this 'agreement' was all her idea.

* * *

Speaking of agreements and contracts: Barbara and Tom are having a winter wedding.

On Christmas day, in fact. In Poplar. With two wedding cakes.

In anyone else, a demand for twin cakes would (rightly) be considered insufferable ostentation. There'd be talk among the parishioners, especially those slightly older ladies who understand part of their purview as to always be looking out for Mr Hereward's best interests. He is, after all, such a nice young man (really, they use that exact expression), for whom nothing is too much trouble. If Tom were marrying anyone else, and she'd decided on two wedding cakes – these guardians of the parish would be asking, who exactly does she think she is? Royalty? Mrs-Two-Cakes-Hereward, they would dub her – and it would spread, and that would be the end of her career as a curate's wife anywhere within twenty miles of Poplar.

It is fortunate, then, that all the inhabitants of the parish understand that the simple fact of the matter is that Barbara is a true appreciator of cake. And the art of icing and filling. And on the grounds that they know her, and like her, no-one could begrudge her that second cake. Besides, they've invited all the children of Poplar to the reception so the second cake may be prudent.

You might think too, that the Christmas day wedding was an affectation, designed to hijack a Special Day for everyone and make it a Special Day for two alone. An inelegant attempt to upstage our Lord and his Nativity. But it was the only time Tom could manage to get a full week off, so they could travel afterwards. He'd offered – many times, in fact – to find an earlier date, to move things around. But Barbara insisted that she didn't mind waiting, and that he'd made a commitment. Then Tom turned to worrying whether, in the eyes of the parish, it wouldn't look like he was dictatorial, and unfair to his new wife. And what a way to start a wedding, by pushing her all the way down to the bottom of the calendar. And then Barbara had laid down the law. She'd made promises too, arrangements. Earlier than December couldn't be done.

Sister Monica Joan's hands, in the unusual level of cold, with her arthritis, are almost unable to unclasp themselves. They have to be uncurled each morning. And then eased, gingerly, with the rubbing on of sweet, fragrant oil warmed in a pan on the stove. Delia helps her with it most mornings. But she does not complain – she is stoic. She is determined to throw the confetti at the wedding. She is ready to unflex and scatter.

It's a rare wedding where no-one has anything bad to say about the bride or groom, but this is one of them.

Ah, but there is one person. There are, even for the simplest wedding, one thousand and one things to be done. Errands a friend ought to offer to undertake. And all those errands – errands which Patsy owes Barbara, part of their shared store of small kindnesses – all those errands tend to swell the week. And with her own work, that makes the matter of finding and purchasing two turtledoves a great deal trickier.

Maybe there is a slim chance that one of her patients is a pigeon fancier. She'll hear the cooing outside, as she goes to check on some post-operative healing, and the conversation will strike up. Two doves, like that, at a bargain price from a grateful patient, and their cage strapped to the back of the bike.

You know that in the maelstrom of wedding organisation, where it's all hands to the pump, there's not even enough time for flights of fancy about pigeon-loving patients. Patsy presses down on the pedals of her bike, legs working hard in frustration. She cycles past a pet shop, predictably devoid of doves. Why 'turtledoves' anyway? Why should a turtle have anything to do with it?

* * *

Barbara's family come down from Liverpool (and the parts next to it, which are really Lancashire, but Liverpool will do). It is a Significant Event for her father to leave his duties as a clergyman at this time of year. He will be the one to conduct the ceremony.

Barbara's younger sisters – a flock of them – (and 'flock', another word which reminds Patsy that her most important Christmas task is not yet performed) – Barbara's many young sisters come down too. Her mother and father stay with Tom. He offers to pay to put them up in a hotel – he will be an earnest and eager son-in-law – but they refuse the expense. His home is quite comfortable enough.

The rest of Barbara's family pile into Nonnatus House, and the effect is quite something. Almost all of Nonnatus House's original inhabitants – with the exception of Sister Monica Joan – are required to double-up in their living quarters. Patsy offers (although it is already expected) to slot in with Delia; Trixie (the Chief Bridesmaid) will share with Phyllis, and Barbara will take the room with her sisters. Barbara insists that no-one else should be forced to endure that.

"Slot in" is an interesting phrase, Patsy reflects almost as soon as she has used it. Strange to use it for two bodies that were not made to fit together.

Patsy and Delia have been thinking – talking – at moments in the year about their living arrangements. Maybe the memory of the flat is cursed, and bringing it up is painful enough. Even if it went horribly wrong though, the idea of it was a liberating one. Maybe it will be different this time next year. But in December 1962, forced to slot together by the generative force of the Gilbert bloodline, these current arrangements are enough.

The queues for the bathroom are terrible though. Barbara's sisters are as lovely, and apologetic about the situation, as Barbara is. They are also just as prone to panic. Panic rocks Nonnatus House on the wedding morning – wails of annoyance and blame – until Trixie finds the veil they've all been looking for. The veil is the Something Old, formerly worn by Barbara's mother, but had been entrusted to one of the sisters to pack in the suitcase. They'd managed the packing, and, diligently, had taken it out to iron. But she had forgotten where she left it, and Trixie found it more by instinct and sense than methodical interrogation – how many times had she lost her own most-prized outfit at the very bottom of the pile of uniforms to be laundered at the end of the week. No harm has been done – other than the commotion convincing Sister Monica Joan that the seventh seal of Revelation had been opened. She was prepared for it, anyway.

Thank the lord for Trixie. Extraordinarily calm in a crisis, that Chief Bridesmaid.

Patsy understands, and appreciates, why Barbara asked Trixie to do this. There are no hard feelings – how could there be?

* * *

Christmas Day, 1962. It will be a Great Day in Poplar, when the daylight finally makes its appearance. Delia has to get up to go to work, so she can be back in time for the ceremony. It will not quite make it into the category of 'White' Wedding, but there is frost on the ground, and a clear sky. On waking, though, Delia is not thinking about the wedding or the frost, or more mundane matters that have entertained her recently, such as where Patsy will find two turtledoves. Patsy's irritation on this issue is almost comical. Patsy is usually so able to organise to think her way through a situation, but this has left her completely flummoxed. But that is not what Delia is thinking about.

She is dwelling, in an uncomplicated, unworried way, on quite how comfortable it is in this bed. The warmth (is it coming from her body, or Patsy's?). It is a small bed - all spare mattresses, blankets and bedding, have been rolled out for the Gilberts. A tiny bed. But this morning it is more comfortable than it has been at any time Delia can recall.

The wedding is the deity's way of paying back Barbara for the disaster of her first arrival in Poplar. No dogs nip and bark at her wedding dress; her clutch bag – safely exchanged for a bouquet for the duration of the service – does not fall open. Not even a mouse dares sneak across the church to interrupt. This is fortunate, because Tom has spent the autumn contending with them, and Trixie had wondered whether her wedding shoes were robust enough to give one a sturdy kick if it threatened to disturb the ceremony. But the heavens are on side. As they should be – Barbara is owed.

After it is all done, and much cake has been consumed. And not a small amount of alcohol either. Barbara's sisters will go home tomorrow. But for tonight, this is still "their" room.

Two turtledoves. Patsy has folded two pieces of crepe paper into their approximate shape. Inexpertly. She has always been terrible at craft, Delia knows. Never seen the value or the point of it – not much call for it in her education. No wonder she has been looking harassed: the first attempts tore multiple times, and filled the contents of the wastepaper bin several times over. The later attempts looked like anonymous white triangles. She has settled on these two, the best of the bunch.

But Patsy is nothing if not scrupulous. And keenly aware of her own crafting limitations.

There is also a deep, square box, which Patsy slides out from under their (temporarily-shared) bed. It wasn't there this morning, when Delia was urgently searching for her shoes (she has more in common with the Gilbert sisters than she would perhaps like to admit).

Inside is a tortoise, not a turtle. Asleep – hibernating, and quite warm – amongst a pile of woodshavings and newspaper. She's already set up quite a nice spot for him in the shed, where he can sleep until spring. Spring is far off – it is Christmas 1962: a tortoise and two white folded-paper doves were the best Patsy could do.

* * *

 **A/N** : So, yes, this (probably unwisely) turned into a sequel.


	3. 1963

_Accompanying soundtrack: Lesley Gore, 'You Don't Own Me' (1963) - you should listen. You really should listen. Go on - I'll wait.  
_

* * *

 **1963**

Patsy's father died in April 1962. It was Easter.

Delia has a patient who claims that 'time heals all wounds'. She offers up this statement as a comfort to the young nurses when they come onto the ward on a Monday morning with broken hearts from the weekend, their young men having let them down in any number of particular ways. It might be true that time heals all wounds, Delia thinks. But most people don't live long enough to find out.

Case in point. Patsy's father didn't live long enough to find out. For the remainder of the time that he lived – after that irruption, that gap in the middle of his life – he threw himself into his work. Trying, possibly, to grasp back some of what he had before.

He was not a bad father, all things considered. He was not particularly distant – or no more than one would expect for a man or his age and class, and certainly not incapable of good humour in the right circumstances and company. Well-liked by all at his club, where he spent his Sunday afternoons. He could be closed off to strangers, by all reports (this is to say that Delia never met him), but it would be facile to put that down to what happened in the war – only the people who knew him both before and after the events of that time should make a judgment on that.

It takes a year for the probate to trickle through, for the papers to be set in order. Testamentary law moves slowly, with no regard to human measures of time. But when the sadness and the travel is over, and all has been calculated, Patsy finds herself moderately well off. Not rich, not exactly. But well off enough that she'd never need to work again, if she liked. The idea doesn't cross her mind. In that sense, Patsy is like her father. One only keeps on living if one keeps on being useful.

The money sits there, waiting, in the account. In its own way, the money is waiting to be useful too. Money, having been around the block a few times, knows it takes people time to get comfortable with it. Some people like to try it on a few times, slipping it on and off like a coat. They make a few tentative purchases, little treats, before they accept that the whole lump sum is really theirs and won't be whipped out of their hands at any moment. (You learn a lot about human ticks and neuroses as anthropomorphised money. You learn to be patient.)

* * *

Not until autumn is Patsy ready to address the money. And then, one day, and it can't be earlier than late October, and her patients are already complaining about the chill in the air, she finds herself thinking that it is ridiculous to wait. (Because – what is she waiting for? For the world to spin and topple over on its axis?)

It's also because her mind is empty, and lets these thoughts in to swirl around, while she waits for Mrs Galsworthy to come back from the ladies with a urine sample. She forgot to bring one from home. Patsy has been waiting a very long time in an empty hall. It's the end of the clinic, all the other patients are gone. Patsy has straightened every clipboard, packed away the charts in regimented order. She taps her watch and waits. And suddenly feels that she ought to _do something -_ having everything within her means to set up the kind of life she wants. (and, rightly, should have.)

Actually, it's not solely Mrs Galsworthy's tensed and never-unloosing bladder which ushers in this realisation. It's the same day, earlier that morning. She's checking in on a new mother, whose younger sister (she might be 19, perhaps 20) is cooing at the baby. She won't actually take the baby off her sister to hold it though, because, between coos, she is very busy crossing to the window, looking out of it, and then moving to the door, hovering in case it needs to be opened. Then she turns to her sister, checks the clock, coos at the baby for a few minutes, and begins her nervous routine again. She's waiting for someone.

'Expecting her boyfriend', explains Patsy's patient, when the girl gets up for her fourth round. 'Literally been pacing round the house all morning. She thinks he might pop the question today - but she's been waiting for him to do it for the past six months, so I've told her we're not getting out the champagne just yet.' The sister sighs, looks a little outraged, then accepts the fundamental truth of the comment and resumes the routine.

And the new mother goes on - her sister should be careful about wishing her youth away, and she'll be married with a toddler and a screaming baby before she knows it (not that she minds it, but she does miss getting more than two hours sleep each night). And that'll be it, then. Don't settle down too quickly, not before you've tried everything you want to try.

And that's it, perhaps – that's the moment at which the decision sets in Patsy's mind. Because obviously this kind of waiting works for other women, women of a different kind, who can stand by the door dreaming of these markers of change arriving in their lives - just walking through the door, get down on one knee, and set them up in a house as a wife for life. Movable objects waiting to be moved and positioned by an inescapable force. (Well, considering the example of the young woman this morning - inescapable if you wait long enough).

So Patsy decides to buy a house. A space that is entirely her own.

She's been inside enough houses in her job to have a rough idea of what she wants. Nothing ostentatious. But something with a garden. And something far enough out of Poplar that she wouldn't have to worry about bumping into someone she'd helped or displeased on her own doorstep. What all these things add up to, she supposes, is a bit of privacy.

Money is pleased that it will soon be out again in the world. Back in circulation, you might say (ha, ha - Money can be quite funny when it wants to be).

* * *

Delia is meant to be reading over some notes, in preparation for an exam. If she passes it, she'll be in line for a promotion, eventually. Assisting with surgeries. Treating some of the more minor things yourself. More trust.

She _will_ read those notes. But instead of the notes, she's reading _A Room of One's Own_. There was a copy in the lost and found box, which had been unfound for so long that it was about to be thrown out until she saved it yesterday morning and brought it home with her. Now the idea has been put into her head: a woman must have a room of her own if she is to create art. Well, that's unarguable.

What art is she going to create though?

Delia hasn't decided. She's not going to use art for the three french hens. That – craft – was last year, with the two turtledoves, which she keeps propped up in front of the mirror. They've survived quite well for paper, although an unexpected gust of wind sweeping through the open window last month almost carried them off. She mulls, idly, the thought of obtaining three living hens. But there's not much space for that. And wouldn't each hen deserve a room or roost of its own too, to allow it the space for its fullest realisation?

From somewhere outside (you can hear it through the single glazing), someone is very loudly playing 'You Don't Own Me'. The hit song of winter 1963. Stridently defiant. Virginia Woolf would probably have approved - more or less the same message, isn't it? Albeit it more bluntly expressed: don't tell me what to do, don't tell me what to say. Delia avowedly doesn't want to be told either of those things, although - winter twilight setting in, day drawing up - some advice on how to conjure up three items of continental poultry would be appreciated.

She gets up to turn on the standing lamp. It's getting dark, it's windy, and the washing lines visible from the window seem to be swaying along to Lesley Gore.

Delia should really read over those notes.

* * *

They look around houses. Delia isn't exactly sure what role she is meant to play, or how she is expected to present herself in all this. Eventually, she settles on the pose of 'supportive friend to grieving daughter' (which isn't untrue, not very). And once the agents or the homeowners are given to understand the circumstances in which Patsy came into the money to buy the house, then they don't particularly ask questions. They infer that this process – home-buying – is what Patsy has been advised to do, probably by an older, wiser, maler accountant. Indeed, some of the older agents soften and become more approving: how admirable that a young woman should want to put her money into a house, something solid, rather than frittering it away like some others you see nowadays. Responsible.

Lesley Gore, probably, would take issue with these verdicts. As the song goes, she's free/and she loves to be free/free to live her life the way she wants/to say and do whatever she pleases. But Patsy and Delia just nod and let the unwelcome and unasked-for praise pass over them.

There is some more deception involved. Just a bit.

Patsy will pretend that she can't quite afford it on her own, and therefore needs to take a lodger. (And no prizes for guessing who that lodger will be.) There's a logic to it. It's safer, probably, in the minds of the men who have shown her round all the possible houses, in varying states of repair, that a single girl should not live entirely on her own. Not that it's a dangerous neighbourhood, not at all – very safe, very respectable. But you never can be too careful, can you?

She'll take a lodger, for protection. Which is fair, in any case - Delia shouldn't really have been staying at Nonnatus House for this long anyway, technically speaking. She's long passed any need to stay her as conducive to her recovering. (Fortunately, nuns never speak technically.) Mindful of the past two or three years, which have passed without reproach, comment or anything but kindness, Patsy sends to the sisters of Nonnatus House what constitutes only a small part of her money, but a relatively large anonymous donation by the standards of the order.

(Sister Julienne knows. Of course she does.)

There was never any question that Delia would live there too. No persuasion needed. And Patsy – in this new mood of doing something, and putting names to the things she wants – is done with failing to express that.

The boldness is attractive. She wears it well.

* * *

She (they) settle on a house which is older, in a broad road. Leafy, even. It's thirty minutes cycle from Poplar - some distance but no distance.

The house, admittedly, needs rather a lot of work. But the floorboards are good. Delia expresses concern about the expense of heating it in winter. She might be tired of living in creaking, cold old houses. There's the money again, and it's taught Patsy well. She can afford to heat it to the rafters, and she intends to.

It takes time to go through, and for people to move out. It won't be ready, theirs, before late January. Technically, technically, this isn't a story about 1963.

On New Year's Eve – because they both work on Christmas day, and the days afterwards are filled with visits and exchanges of presents and goodwill – but on New Year's Eve they both find they have the evening free. The Three French Hens haven't yet made their appearance (there were other presents in lieu, obviously). Delia promises that they'll be ready soon. "Difficult to catch, they've got scrawny little legs but can run like anything". Patsy worries – she can't tell if that's a joke. There's a garden, true. Perhaps space for a henhouse at the end of it.

* * *

It is New Year's Eve 1963, threatening soon to turn into 1964. If we don't move quickly, this year will be gone without anything important occurring in it.

Can it be snowing? It's snowing. The snow has settled enough to be beautiful, but not so much as to make being outside a challenge. They decide to walk, for no reason in particular. And they find themselves walking towards the house, and then stopping outside it. The windows are dark, and no-one can be home, but there's enough light from the street to make out its distinguishing features.

So this feels like it should be the moment. Delia reaches into the pockets of her coat and brings out three…French brandies. Those very small bottles that contain scarcely more than two or three sips in them. Three different flavours, three different shades of golden brown. Cognac, armagnac, and another one. The last one looks to have the same shade, if not the same viscosity, as golden syrup.

"Is there an explanation for why I'm being presented with three tiny bottles instead of three birds?" Patsy asks.

"No", says Delia, "None whatsoever".

* * *

 _ **AN** : Posting this before Sunday evening (UK time), when it becomes wholly and obviously non-canonical._

 _For no apparent reason, it felt important to be singing You Don't Own Me on the weekend of 21st January 2017._


	4. 1964

**1964**

What happened this year?, Delia reviews, as she tries to urge herself out of bed on one of the last mornings in December, almost the last morning of the year.

You might frame it as a list: there was an election, and an Olympics (not in that order). Britain got rid of the death penalty. Malta became its own country. That last one pleased the Maltese barman at one of the clubs she and Patsy occasionally visit. There were double measures in every drink ordered that night, and everyone went a little wild. Wilder than you might expect – but perhaps the kind of people one finds in that club are not the sorts of people the British government has in mind when it imagines the nation and the nation's desires. A wild night. Given Patsy's height, you'd assume that her constitution would guard her against the effects of double measures; but in fact it was Delia who took it in her stride. Delia doesn't think she's ever seen Patsy dance with such a lack of concern for anyone who might have been watching. It was rather nice, actually, swaying with such reckless abandon. Maltese independence ought to happen more often.)

So, weigh it up. The year a sum total of election, Olympics, Malta (and other independences), votes in the commons, laws in the air, films and songs released. Are things getting better, incrementally? Too hard to say, or too hard to think of at this particular moment at least – Delia groans; she drank too much last night. In a moment she will have to move herself bodily, and face this almost-last day of the year.

Delia rolls onto her side and decides this sort of end-of-year review exercise is better left to the papers and newscasters, and that she must concentrate on banishing her headache. (And there, Patsy's metabolism has the definite advantage; she never wakes up like this).

What happened this year? Perhaps it was marked only by the mundane, non-events, a year of settling into place – this place.

The Mundane: the kitchen still needs a new coat of paint. The white (off-white?) walls it sports at present don't look quite right. Maybe it's the way the light comes in through the long windows. The kitchen looks out onto the garden - maybe the green of the garden is colouring the light that gets in. They've tried all sorts of paints for the wall – tried it out in small squares by the skirting board near the door – but neither of them like any of the colours. (That's the problem: you need a diagnosis before you can find a cure, and they can't yet tell what's needed. Maybe they need to live with it for longer).

In a moment of despair, Delia joked that they should just paint it black and be done with it. Patsy had tilted her head, closing her eyes as if to visualise it, and looked worryingly like she was considering it as a real suggestion. Delia decided to drag Patsy out of the kitchen at that moment. The walls may send her mad. Delia must be in charge of regulating both painting and Patsy's sanity.

* * *

A boring year of settling into place, including the car.

"We should get a car" Delia had said, idly, one day when they had both collapsed after painting the final wall of the spare room (the final room, if you don't count the kitchen).

Patsy was not opposed to the idea in principle, but not convinced of the practicality of it – who needs a car in London? Besides, this has been Trixie's sermon for the week in Keep Fit (not that Patsy goes, but when she sees Trixie, Trixie takes up the subject like an evangelist). Healthy people walk; getting off the bus a stop early and walking home is as good as doing 15 minutes of a keep fit class.

Trixie's right. They vaccinate, they advise against drinking or smoking to excess. But a body needs to move as well. And living in a city sometimes makes people forgetful of that. Trixie has, rather unexpectedly, become a campaigner for more green spaces.

"We could go places." Delia places her hand on Patsy's paint-covered forearm (most of that paint is Delia's fault; she is far from precise with the roller). "Just drive off wherever we wanted, whenever we wanted. You can't really do that on a bicycle, unless you want to get a tandem."

Well, then the idea makes sense.

They don't need a car in London, but could use a car to get out of London. They could use it to get away from the colours of the kitchen walls.

They can easily afford it. That's wasn't the issue. Delia fancied something a little more…flashy than Patsy would otherwise go for. (Patsy obviously gave into this, and not simply because she wants a quiet life, or because it's Delia. It's because some of Delia's arguments are quite compelling. Patsy's spent her life denying herself nice things, Delia insists. It's not extravagant. Delia believes Patsy deserves these things, in fact Delia insists on it. One of Delia's jobs, she's slowly realised over this past year, is to convince Patsy that she deserves the money she's come into.)

But Delia had also done her homework when it comes to engines and exhausts and clutches and gearboxes (her time with Phyllis had been productively spent). Phyllis also arms her with warnings about believing a single word that comes out of the mouths of car dealers. In the end, concerned that they will forget the specifics of her counsels, Phyllis goes with them. In anticipation of the purchase, Phyllis taught Patsy how to drive (and that is a different story. Two similarly rigorous personalities in a car together: it did not go smoothly.)

Phyllis, contrary to Delia's expectations, doesn't tut at the selections, or try to steer them towards something else. She endorses their choices. Weeks later, when Delia is discussing it with her, it turns out that Phyllis also believes that Patsy should have nice things. Phyllis approves this slowly unfolding project of encouraging Patsy to indulge herself.

Phyllis also enjoyed herself. Especially when they took their chosen vehicle out for a spin. Delia had joked about a buying a Triumph Fury, but in the end Patsy was torn between a Ford Consul and a Ford Corsair. Two names that couldn't suggest a more different attitude: one a benevolent Roman statesman, the other a buccaneering pirate. In the end, the Corsair won.

"Listen to it purr!" exclaimed Phyllis; and she tapped it on the bonnet when they get out. Phyllis is given to plain-speaking, but she indulges in a small rapture when she speaks of this car.

So it was a done deal. And even Patsy smiles unguardedly when she parks it outside the house.

* * *

There's no need to take up time or space with other domestic matters. Only to say that, all in all, the things in the house have taken a long time to accomplish. Now there's a topic – things that have taken a long time to accomplish.

Like the Forth Bridge. Opened this year (six years after they began work on it), by the queen primly cutting a ribbon - although given the size of it, smashing a bottle of champagne along its metal girders would have been more dramatic. It spans the gap between Edinburgh and Fife – two thousand metres long - across the water. It is a magnificent, sparse structure. And the job of painting it, and engineering it, that puts the job of fixing up this house in perspective. Delia admires whoever it was who had the vision to build it.

It even puts the matter of the ivy in perspective. When they bought the house, the ivy was there. The agent who sold it to them advised them to remove it as soon as possible, tutting that the current owner hadn't yet bothered to. A nightmare, suggested the surveyor. One day you'll wake up in your beds and find the back wall crumbling down.

But neither Patsy or Delia has the heart to remove it, and the wall hasn't crumbled yet. For form's sake, a tree surgeon came round, and shook his head at this, as if to say: silly women with their romantic notions of crawling plants. But it is beautiful, the way it grows up. And old - as old as the house - grown up and into it. To strip it out seems destructive somehow. Patsy laughs and says that she is going soft in the head, and that to be sentimental over creeping ivy is a sign of mental deterioration and incipient old age. (But Delia knows Patsy was exactly this sentimental to begin with).

That bridge, Delia is thinking of, because recently she and Patsy drove over it. They were taking Sister Mary Cynthia to her new life. She's been moved up (promoted?) in the order; to head a house just outside of Fife. Who knows how the Lord disposes these things; but the commandment came down to Sister Mary Cynthia in the earthly form of a telephone call in early November. Her diligent labours in the vineyard of the Lord, all these years, had not gone unnoticed. Now she is to be rewarded with a job equally as demanding as the one she has in Poplar. She is to take charge of a small home for the long-term sick, complex cases, administered by the order, on the outskirts of Fife. The constituents are rural and the challenges will be different. Fewer babies; more loneliness and desperation. For all that gloom, it is an honour – Sister Julienne cannot remember a time when the order selected someone as young to lead.

She had to be there for December 23rd. Wouldn't most other, reasonable new jobs begin in the new year?

She was sent a special allowance to purchase warmer clothes.

Sister Mary Cynthia, holding fast to her vows, doesn't have many personal possessions - barely enough to fill a suitcase - so she could easily take the train, but they want to send her off properly. So they tell Sister Mary Cynthia at her leaving party (and even Trixie came back for it) that Patsy and Delia will drive her up there. Halfway through the festivities, Trixie slips in. Sister Mary Cynthia expresses surprise that Trixie has made it – that she has put aside everything else that occupies her now. Trixie, who is certainly not crying, wipes what is not a tear from her eye, hugging Sister Mary Cynthia, and telling her not to be so silly, and that she wouldn't have missed it for the world. The two of them began this together.

Sister Monica Joan wishes she could go on the journey too – but the drive is a long one, even give the soft and supportive upholstery of the Ford Corsair. Besides – she's already had a day trip in the Corsair. They went to Stonehenge in the late summer, an event which Sister Julienne labelled a day trip to the countryside for her sister's health, but Sister Monica Joan herself labelled "a field exercise in the history of comparative religion". They even got ice creams from a café near to the circle of stones; Sister Monica Joan was delighted to discover pistachio. It was oddly exotic for the middle of Salisbury plain, but perhaps higher forces - god or gods - were at work in bringing that flavour to the cafe. (Or perhaps the owner of the cafe was Sicilian, from a town of pistachios, and decided it was far more exciting than vanilla. On that he was right.)

People didn't know quite what to make of a nun in her habit making a circuit around the ancient stones. Whether she was blessing it or exorcising it. Sister Monica Joan insisted on walking around the site twice, once clockwise, once anticlockwise (and giving that ambulation its ancient name of "widdershins"; for anti-clockwise is a cryptic, perhaps magical direction). She was just testing, in case there was a different feeling to it.

Sister Monica Joan cannot go to Fife, but brings down the Nonnatus House stairs (almost toppling down them) a heavy suitcase full of books for her departing sister to read in her new home. It's fortunate she's not travelling by train; the case is difficult even to lift. Sister Monica Joan has included within a list of reading instructions (which Sister Mary Cynthia won't find until she opens the suitcase several days later), advising which books are best read when. Some are seasonal; others are to be read when in need of a text to nourish or fend off a particular mental state. There are books to be read when she needs an infusion of spiritual optimism, and books that will calm her when the requests and demands of her sisters become too much for her.

Sister Monica Joan knows the books will outlast her. But that is not a cause for sadness - it's precisely the point.

* * *

So they drive up. They start early, because the drive into the North is a long one. And once they get up there, the fields are long too. It seems a sort of ancient landscape of Christianity, quite different to the one they've left behind in London and the south, tucked away and richly ornamented; here the churches stick out like jagged teeth. Bare. The land of early pilgrims, dispatched to the ends of the earth.

They stay the night in Sister Mary Cynthia's new home. The mother house was correct in its suspicions: she has an instinctive air of authority. It would be interesting to stay for a few days, to watch how she is installed. But they need to hurry back because Patsy is on call for Christmas Day. And Sister Mary Cynthia has her own obligations to attend to, pressing on her already (the deputy really has not been up to much).

On the way back, they leave early. They cross the Forth Bridge when dawn has barely broken. And they allow themselves a break, once they have crossed. They pull over to the side of the road, and stop the car to look at the view; sipping from the thermos of tea Sister Mary Cynthia's new recruits have left them with. They are right at the edge of the forth, made by a glacier in retreat that carved out the craggy landscape on either side.

The tea is warming, and the earth is warming a little, so it is possible to stand outside the car, and take in the view over. A pleasant little irony: the first crossing here (a ferry, not a bridge) was to take monks over to the abbey. No mention of nuns in the historical record though. It is a chilly morning, and even the sun's appearance does not do much to alter that fact. They are the only two humans in this landscape.

They sit back inside. Delia checks the map. Delia fights with the map. The road atlas they have bought for the occasion is full of pages and pages of places and roads amongst which she cannot pinpoint their location. It shouldn't be difficult. They are next to a distinct body of water, on a real, tarmacked road. Delia flicks through the pages furiously, slightly more irritated by the minute. Patsy, of long experience, knows better than to comment on this. Delia has to be left alone to fight with the map – offers of help are unhelpful. This is not an ideal time to be learning, but on the way up, Sister Mary Cynthia had offered to do the navigating. Perhaps she was nervous about taking up her new office, and wanted that task to distract her.

The fluttering of thin map paper inside the car; the fluttering of wings outside. Birds – blackbirds – land and settle on the warm bonnet. They've now been parked here long enough that the birds suspect it is part of the scenery in the same way as the nearby trees or the bank of the river.

Delia finally settles on a page, victorious.

"Ready. Off we go then."

"That was quick." Patsy allows herself. But it's said lovingly.

Delia makes a face.

Patsy continues, gesturing towards the windscreen and car bonnet. "And there you go, four coal-y birds. Your present, right on time."

"Calling birds. Not coal-y."

"Yes, but that's where 'calling' comes from. Colly, or coaly. Because they're coal-coloured. Don't look so skeptical - all issues of etymology are to be taken up with Sister Monica Joan when we get back. She was very pleased when I asked her to look it up for me."

"I'm not skeptical. I just don't think you can claim this as a real Christmas present, unless you arranged for them to land on the car at this exact moment."

"Aha, but wait a second, there's something else. These coaly birds just gave me the idea to announce it."

(Delia isn't that much of a fool. Also she knows what's coming next. She groans a little.)

"You haven't, have you?"

"Darling, I have."

With that, Patsy gets out of the car, goes to the boot. As she opens the door, the flock of birds (more than four, in fact) scatter and flap away to rest somewhere else. Patsy comes back inside and hands over a basket – covered.

Delia looks inside. Inside there are four lumps of coal. The present, as per the song and the agreement.

"You might at least have got me a whole bag."

"Not enough space in the car with all the luggage. And I thought you'd appreciate the presentation."

Delia is still frowning, probably not from the struggle with the road atlas.

Patsy continues. "Besides, think of the upholstery in here, and the coal dust, and you're the one who insisted on such an extravagant car..."

Patsy can't keep this up; the look on Delia's face is too much.

"And, obviously, though I shouldn't have to say it, not your only present."

Delia brightens, slightly. "Still, it's not very complimentary to be given a lump of coal for Christmas."

"I suppose I didn't think of the association. Sorry." She leans over and kisses Delia. And then puts the car in gear, and checks the mirrors at Phyllis as taught her (even though the road is quiet and the land is still), and pulls out.

* * *

 _ **AN** : I love the BBC, and would defend it to the death, but is it too much to hope for a plotline whic isn't *deeply traumatic* this year?_


	5. 1965

**1965**

On 21st December 1965 – strictly speaking, on the night between 21st and 22nd December – the whole valley floods. The inundation is overwhelming. Mrs Busby calls Delia that morning – just to reassure her. The flooding in the valleys has been so swift and unexpected that it's made the national news. Images of elderly people being lifted from their homes by the emergency services line the front page of the papers.

Both her mother and father are fine, and warmed through by tea. So she is not to panic. Mrs Busby is slightly concerned about the carpet in the hall (new only last year) – but there's no point crying over spilt milk, her husband says. They're lucky to be warm and dry, and leave the rest to the good lord. Mrs Busby is about to go onto her next line, that they'll stay in the church hall tonight and go to her friend Cath for Christm—but Delia doesn't let her finish that sentence. "Come down and stay with us." At least until the waters recede. At least for Christmas.

They've plenty of space. A spare bedroom, immaculately decorated, and – the luxury of it! – a second bathroom. Her parents will be much more comfortable here than with Cath. Besides, Delia is her daughter – isn't her mother always insisting that family comes first? So – that's that, then.

Her mother does not mention the following things: that Patsy, not Delia, should be issuing the invitation. That Delia is a lodger – technically. That Patsy might resent having Delia's family (they're no-one to her) descend upon them at Christmas. That Patsy might want to invite other people around. That she might already have done so without telling Delia.

What she does admit is that Mr Busby really doesn't get on with Cath's husband. He's from North Wales – Conwy. And it's not that Mr Busby has a prejudice against the north Welsh. But Robert Jones is always looking to start an argument and foist his wrong-headed political opinions on others.

No arguments in London, Delia promises, brightly.

Mr Busby checks the train times, and they will be down the next afternoon, 23rd December.

This gives Delia one day to find those five gold rings.

She doesn't worry about telling Patsy. They argue (not vehemently) about many things – where to take their summer holiday; whether Patsy shouldn't let Delia pay her some form of rent towards the cost of the house (because Patsy has put it in both their names, under some elaborate legal device – there's always a way around these things when you have money to pay for it); and the final argument – whether they should get a dog. Those disagreements resolved the following way: they agree, for Patsy's sake, on the rule that they won't go anywhere colder than whatever the temperature is in London. Otherwise it's not really a holiday, is it? Patsy wins the second argument, but gives way (tactically) on the third. Delia mulls over the types of dogs.

Disagreements. But she knows that Patsy would herself have insisted on her mother and father coming to London for Christmas having been made homeless by an act of God. Patsy would have probably insisted that they come down today, worrying about the heating in the church hall.

Delia recounts the story of the flood to Patsy when she gets in from work. Before Delia has reached the bit about them being evacuated to the church hall, Patsy has already intervened – "that's no way to spend Christmas - you must ring them up right now and tell them to come here. Only, do you think your mother would consent to coming?"

And when Delia has assured Patsy that she has, and her mother has, and they will be down by tomorrow afternoon, Patsy interrupts her again (she can't help it). "We'll have to begin cleaning right now."

It's not that the house is particularly dirty – in fact, it's particularly clean. Not kept so for visitors (they do have visitors, but for obvious reasons these are mostly friends so dear and so close that they would excuse any slovenliness), and not out of any particular pride in it, but just out of a habit that both of them have fallen into. But now there is Delia's mother to contend with. She is definitely the sort of person one cleans for, and in anticipation of. You scrub with all the vigour of preparing for a royal visit. You scrub the sin out of the stone floor.

Delia, who is used to her mother's pursed lips, and Patsy's desire to please, has already made a start. If you inflict your parents on the woman you love, you ought not to inflict the preparatory cleansing of the house on her too.

* * *

It doesn't begin well.

Mrs Busby is scarcely through the door when she observes it is very warm in the house.

Patsy looks nonplussed. It is winter outside, and they are indoors – where it _ought_ to be warmer. Surely that is the convention. (She says none of this.)

Mrs Busby seems to be of the view that all this heating is somehow extravagant. Better to shiver as God intended.

Mr Busby – with tact, which he had anticipated having to deploy, but perhaps not until he had physically stepped over the threshold – attempts to remind his wife of how cold they'd been only 24 hours before. Then they'd been wet up to their knees as they waded out of the house. It's a pleasure to be inside and dry. He's looking at Patsy when he says this.

As they're being shown up the stairs, to the bedroom. Mr Busby offers some comments on the prospects of Christmas in London to Delia and his wife. Patsy has retreated to the kitchen to prepare them some tea (and the ginger cake, which Mrs Busby has brought down as a thank-you gift. It would have been something more, but the floods chased her out of her own kitchen. This is, shamefully, shop-bought.) Mr Busby has had Christmas in some places – a training camp; even in Burma, actually, during the war. But this, in 1965 – this is exciting. The centre of the world, the centre of culture.

He'd been worried that his wife might have something to say about the dust. She inspects the skirting board in their room, but can't find anything. She does wonder whether yellow was quite the colour to choose for this room.

Something Mr Busby has observed: women, when grown, always find it harder to get on with their mothers than their fathers. That's just the order of things. The expectation mothers put on themselves and that are put on them by others. He's never had the sense that his interactions with his daughter ought to live up to a certain model. And that's freeing, perhaps. A thing he's thought to himself many times: he's not once regretted never having a son. Though perhaps they ought to have had another child – it would have taken some of the pressure off his daughter.

He is genuinely pleased to be here, proud of Delia for her promotion. Not one person could say a thing to him that could in any way alter the very fine opinion he has of his daughter.

* * *

It starts over a ham.

Delia has offered to cook for Christmas Day, suspecting the strain on Patsy may be too much. She will always demand perfection of herself; Delia is more moderate – and more appreciative of Patsy. They don't have any particular routine for where they would go, or what they would eat for Christmas lunch. They might go round to Nonnatus House – there's an open invitation there – bringing some treats with them. They might see Trixie, if she's in the country. They could keep it on their own, just the two of them, depending on their work rotas.

They sit down to eat. The first part – the salmon. Delia mentions that she must just pop into the kitchen and check on the ham in a few minutes. But she'll be back.

"Not normal, though, is it?" says Mrs Busby.

She means nothing by it. Only that a ham is not normal Christmas fare – only that they, at home, normally have a goose, raised by a neighbouring farmer.

Who is it who snaps first? Who would you expect to?

It's Delia who looks at her mother, and then walks out. Not to check on the abnormal ham, but all the way up the stairs. All the way into the bedroom which her mother was careful not to acknowledge or ask about when she took her inventory of the house. Delia shuts the door with ferocity. She's not stomped like that since she was 15.

It's her father who comes upstairs to find her. He has no concerns about walking into a bedroom of ambiguous (or at least undiscussed) status. Well – he knocks first. "Pet, can I come in?"

He's not a man of few words, not really. Mrs Busby would never have married a man who rolled over easily. He's capable of saying his piece.

But this – the thing that they're now dancing around – is something he and his wife have never had out – not in so many words.

"What's this then? Tears at Christmas?"

Delia just sobs. She thinks they are almost under control, attempts to say something, and then lets out another, ragged and gasping sob.

Downstairs, Patsy and Mrs Busby are sitting across the table from one another. Patsy, ever practical, has gone into the kitchen and removed the ham from the oven, and carved it. She won't see her guests going hungry, and she won't see Delia's best culinary efforts go to waste. They'll have it in sandwiches later, if they must.

Patsy has carved the ham, is serving Mrs Busby. Mrs Busby looks chastened. She really hadn't meant anything by it, she is saying to Patsy. She didn't think – she's still not quite recovered from the shock of the flood. But she wouldn't have Delia cry on Christmas day. Not when she – not when both of them – have been so kind. And Patsy is replying, as placidly as she can manage, yes Mrs Busby.

There's a speech that Mrs Busby can't bring herself to make. It's something about not understanding Delia's choices, but wanting her to be happy. Of living in a world now that is so like the one she was born into, where there are so many more choices. Things that would never have occurred to her even to think of. And yet, there's that bedrock – of wanting Delia to be happy. Of having to compute all these things, and in the equation, the undeniable fact that Delia is happy, now.

She settles for asking Patsy to call her by her first name. "I think we've known each other long enough now."

She passes the carrots.

And there they are, passing carrots and potatoes and bread sauce – and Patsy checking with her mother whether it is quite warm enough, and Mrs Busby saying it absolutely is – when Delia comes down with her father's arm around her shoulder.

* * *

At the end of the visit, which lasts almost, but not quite, a week, Patsy reflects that the arguments they had were normal. Familial. Strained but (for the most part) only in the ordinary way of things.

Waving her parents off, Delia realises that she's forgotten about the five gold rings. She knew there was an errand at the back of her mind on that afternoon she spent stocking up on emergency cleaning supplies. She stops on the way back from the train station.

She hands them over that evening. Five gold rings (not quite gold, but golden, near enough). No tricks, no jokes. Five straightforwardly golden rings.

Patsy is awed.

"They're beautiful. And one for each day of the working week. You really shouldn't have. I mean it."

"One for each of the days you endured my parents."

"Hardly endured. I was glad to have them."

"Pats!"

"No, truly. You know I told your father he should come down in the summer for the gardening show. Especially if he'll have to replant his allotment."

"Worryingly, I suspect you meant that."

"And worryingly, I suspect you spent far too much on these. I don't need five, you know. One would have been enough."

"One would not have been authentic. Five is prescribed: five you shall get. And it's a break from the birds – I thought we should make the most of it."

"Shall I try one on?"

"I wish you would."

There is a subtly different design on each ring. Patsy picks out the one which is made of two threads of gold intertwined and criss-crossing.

"You know, this is a terrible tone to set. Am I going to have to be accurate with the six geese next year?"

"It is far – far – too early to be thinking about Christmas 1966. And besides-"

And besides-

"Let's have one year where we don't try to do anything clever with it. Nothing unusual, nothing strange. Just us – you and me, and these five gold rings."

"One would have been enough", Patsy repeats.


	6. 1966

**1966**

Delia is sitting at the table, nursing a cup of tea which is almost cold.

Patsy has just come in; Delia is just about to go out. It is early December, still dark outside. Patsy has the best of it, coming into the brightly-lit kitchen and shaking off the night. Delia would rather not go out. The kitchen is warm – she's warmed it for Patsy – but soon she'll have to leave it.

There's just one thing, one pressing thing that Delia needs to mention. And she might as well do it now.

"About Christmas." She begins.

This prompts Patsy, who looked tired when she came in, to glance down at her hand and smile. She's not wearing any of last year's gifts because she's just come in from work. She smiles because she's been expecting this.

"However am I going to match those beautiful rings? Don't worry. I've been giving it some thought."

This is definitely the time to come out with it. Delia comes out with it.

"I've been thinking too. Could we skip the geese, please? Let's just not do it this year."

Patsy seems taken aback. She interrupts the operation of the kettle. "Are you cross with me? I'm sorry if I was short with you last night when I couldn't find my keys. I really am bad tempered sometimes."

"I've lived with your short temper so long that I now find it endearing."

"What then?"

Delia needs to leave in the next ten minutes, or she'll risk being late.

"It's not you, obviously. It's the year. It's a complicated story. You'll think it's so stupid, I almost don't want to tell you."

"Surely you know that I've lived with your complicated stupid stories so long that I now find them endearing."

So, quickly, Delia tells the following story.

When she was six or seven, for a special treat for Delia's birthday, Delia's mam took them to the banks of a deep dark lake in Wales. It was summer, actually, so the water did not look so deep or dark. Her father came too. They took sandwiches and cake, and sat on a bench overlooking the water. Delia's father promised that after lunch they would try and find a boat and hire it for half an hour and row out into the deep dark centre of the lake. Delia, at six or seven, wasn't convinced that such a feat of strength was possible. They must have been halfway through their lunch when a goose took an unusual interest in Delia – or, rather, the sandwich in her hand. The goose was fully her size (she's always been small). It arched its neck to get at her sandwich – in fact, the goose had to bend down to get a proper bite in, but gave her a nip on the hand instead. Her mother and father, who had by now cottoned on to what was happening, urged her just to drop the sandwich – there were plenty more in the bag. But Delia – stubborn or shocked, it's too long ago to remember now – refused to. She ran away from the goose, down towards the lake. The goose followed. Maybe it now had a taste for human flesh. So Delia ran faster, along the edge of the lake. The goose was rearing up and flapping its wings. And Delia, thinking she was at a safe distance, turned around to see it - and fell in to the deep dark waters of the lake. And spent the rest of her birthday sitting, sopping wet, on the hour-long bus-ride back home, with her dad's coat wrapped around her.

Patsy tries very hard not to laugh. She's aided by the fact she's tired from a long shift and the muscles of her diaphragm can't quite summon the energy.

"I mean it". Delia puts her coat on, shivering at the memory of those lake waters. "I can't stand them. Not even a toy goose."

"We'll take a year off then. You can expect a very ordinary present. I shall buy you" (Patsy pauses to consider how ordinary she dare be) "a new set of plates or a new pair of curtains."

"That's fine with me." Delia kisses Patsy. She wraps a scarf around her neck - the scarf has lived in the house too long for either of them to remember whom it originally belonged to. "And if my mam rings while I'm out, you're not to invite her round. Just us this Christmas. Even if the water's up to her neck. No geese, no parents."

* * *

No geese, no parents – so this should be easy. After last Christmas, Christmas 1966 should be easy.

Patsy has taken the day off, agreed and negotiated long in advance. The year before she'd spent Christmas morning working. Delia takes it off, and takes of Christmas Eve too. The price of this is agreeing to work an awful series of shifts over New Year. When the time comes, of course, she'll be cursing herself. But delayed gratification is not an idea she agrees with (and given her experiences, why should it be? Who are these people who enjoy putting off their pleasures?)

Sister Monica Joan also distrusts people who would put off until tomorrow pleasures which they could enjoy today. (Which is, when one thinks about it, perhaps not entirely congruent with the church's teaching of virtuous behaviour in this life meeting a heavenly reward.)

Why should Sister Monica Joan come into this – this Christmas without interruption, and without geese?

Here we go.

Because of a burst water main. Somewhere under Poplar, something has gone wrong, in the Victorian pipes which snake around the city – and now there's no running water to Nonnatus House. Other than a few rusty droplets when one really puts the taps under pressure. The local authorities can't quite locate the problem and, now, a few days before Christmas, aren't going to be able to. They have a much larger burst pipe to deal with elsewhere in the corporation, and they're running reduced teams of men at work ('reduced in their training too, it seems', adds Sister Julienne – in what, for her, is quite a bitter tone).

It's not really hygienic to remain: the nuns and midwives must move out. Most find accommodation easily; some are transferred to the on-call rooms at the hospital. Sister Julienne will lodge with the Turners. But Sister Monica Joan is a more difficult prospect – no matter how they dress it up, they cannot say that she serves any particular medical function, per se. And then there are concerns about her age and particularities, and her adaptation to a new and unfamiliar circumstance. So there is talk of her being sent back to the Mother House.

But she very clearly does not want to go. She'd be happy to stay in Nonnatus House, she insists. It would be no privation – humans managed their ablutions without taps and municipal water companies for hundreds of years. The Desert Fathers drew their water from a well, why mightn't she? (The obvious answer: because she's not a Desert Father with a great grey beard who lives in the cave, because there are no wells just round the corner, because if the teachings of the church have not altered, then the teachings of public health and sanitation have quite moved on).

It is cruel though, to send her to the Mother House. There's no television for one thing. Where she will be expected to spend her days in an orderly regimen of prayer and busy work. Sister Monica Joan doesn't object to either the prayer or the work, but resists the prospect of an orderly regimen.

Besides. Once sent there, what if she can never come back? What if she is deemed too old and infirm to be allowed back? That's the real fear that bites at her.

The irony of it doesn't escape either Patsy or Delia – that last Christmas' guests were driven to their home because of surfeit of water, and this year, because of a lack of it.

* * *

Sister Monica Joan, you should know, is fully herself in 1966, as much as she ever was, compos mentis, no question about it. She is also determined to be a good houseguest. And she mostly manages it.

She is considerate. Patsy and Delia have a television, but Sister Monica Joan does not automatically assume control of it, just because she knows all the best shows and the schedules. (Well, she does really, but offers to switch the channel if they wish, knowing that she'll never be taken up on her request).

And when the television falls quiet, she offers them entertainment of her own devising: stories of Christmas Eve during the Great War. A story (which they must promise not to share with Sister Julienne) of her getting up very early one morning this summer and hitching a lift on a milk-float and taking a drive around all the East End. The same milkman, as it turns out, serves their house. He is very surprised to meet Sister Monica Joan at the door at 4am in the morning on the day before Christmas Eve. She's been up to make Delia a cup of tea before her early shift; she has been impatiently waiting for the milk. She's promised another ride when the warmer weather comes in the spring. Or sooner, if he installs a heater on his vehicle.

And because she doesn't believe in delayed gratification, she insists on buying presents to be opened on Christmas Eve (in addition to those she has brought with her for Christmas Day).

On Christmas Eve, both of them are thanked for their hospitality with books, although neither of them can work out exactly how they are being thanked.

Delia gets a biography of Charles Darwin and _The Origin of Species_. The significance of the pair is not immediately apparent to her.

Patsy unwraps a book of seventeenth-century poetry, written by John Wilmot, The Notorious Libertine Earl of Rochester. The content is intermittently lascivious.

Both say thank you. When Sister Monica Joan has retired to her nightly devotions (with a piece of gingerbread to keep her going), they look at each other, and the books.

"What are these supposed to signify?" Patsy hisses, but quietly, in case the conversation travels.

Delia turns to their title pages, to see if Sister Monica Joan has added a dedication or cryptic clue. She has not.

Patsy makes a suggestion. "We could swap. Go on, you'd obviously enjoy the poetry far more than I would."

"We could not. She's obviously given us them for a reason."

"A very mysterious set of reasons. Is she encouraging me to outrage public decency?"

Delia is flicking through the introduction to the book of poetry. "He died from syphilis at 33, did you read that? How sad."

"I sincerely hope that is not the cryptic hidden message."

"Perhaps she thought you'd find it medically interesting to read the poetry of syphilis."

"And she's suggesting you go off on a tour of the Galapagos Islands?"

Whatever Patsy says, Delia is not swapping.

"I miss the days when she'd quote Shakespeare and the Bible at us. At least we could look up the references for some sort of clue to her meanings."

"You can't really mean that. You remember when that grandmother came into Nonnatus House and asked for the address of the Maternity Home, and Sister Monica Joan gave it to her from memory? And the woman didn't believe she'd remembered it correctly and asked her to look it up?"

"Yes." Patsy begins laughing. "And she was so indignant at her memory being attacked that she told the woman that her memory was a storehouse of treasures, and she could remember every verse of Solomon's Canticles, word for word, and began to recite, and wouldn't stop until Sister Julienne made her sit down and take a long drink of water as if she had the hiccoughs?"

Another glass, and another half an hour, and then they go to bed.

Another hour after that and it's Christmas Day.

* * *

Patsy has kept to her promise. Almost. In the sense that she has purchased some entirely ordinary gifts for Delia, quite unrelated to geese, and nothing that resembles even the outline of a goose. But she has allowed herself one exception: she buys goose eggs. To make an omelette on Christmas morning. A festive treat, and, symbolically-speaking, a kind of revenge for Delia. And, just to be absolutely clear – just to avoid the flooding back of memories of the deep dark lake – she canvases Delia's approval first. And Delia thinks it would be a rather nice thing for Christmas morning, provided the goose who laid them is far, far away.

The eggs don't survive very long, and certainly not long enough to achieve a proper revenge. Patsy had thought through the obvious danger: that Sister Monica Joan would be tempted to make them into a cake.

But this is not what happens. Sister Monica Joan is intrigued by the eggs, but has no culinary plans for them. But before they become an omelette, she decides to examine them. They are the size of two big chicken's eggs. She's wondering about the size of a Dodo's egg in comparison to a goose egg, drawing some careful Darwinian inferences. She holds them up to the light, and wonders whether Patsy has a tape measure.

And Patsy hasn't the heart – not now, not at Christmas, not when she's been driven out of her own home – to take them out of her hands to begin cooking.

And then Sister Monica Joan, who is distracted by a carol beginning on the radio, It Came Upon the Midnight Clear, one of her very favourites, and whose grip was not the firmest to begin with, drop both eggs, onto the stone floor, with a hard crack.

They set about cleaning up the mess of yokes and shells quickly, not least because if Delia were to slip in the mixture, it really would become a complex.

Before lunch (and they are going round to see the Turners), it's snowing outside. Falling down like fat white feathers on the garden.

"What if", Patsy says, "What if I build you a nice snow goose? And you can knock it over."

"It would be a shame to waste the snow."

"Quite. One might even consider it a form of therapy."

That's what they do. It's cold but cathartic. Sister Monica Joan joins in (her love of animals does not extend to snow animals), finishing it off with a rather series of kicks. Patsy applauds their efforts.

They go inside, hot and cold simultaneously, to dress for lunch. They agree – the three of them – that this is probably not a thing they ought to discuss over Christmas Dinner with the Turners and Sister Julienne. It's a long story, and not told properly, it would make them seem quite deranged, and Sister Julienne would only worry about the snow damaging her sister's shoes and general state of health. But Sister Monica Joan has a flush in her cheeks, and proclaims that she feels more refreshed than she has in years. Spiritually and physically refreshed.

* * *

They don't solve the mystery of the books. By the time either of them thinks to ask on Christmas Day, Sister Monica Joan is already snoring, and the two of them are in bed.

"That's two encounters with geese survived today then. I wonder if this is a goose-down duvet? Because that would make three."

"I suspect it's synthetic."

"Well, which of us bought it?"

"I can't remember." Patsy sighs. "I'm afraid that doesn't say very much for our household accounting."

Delia thinks, but does not say aloud, that in this at least, Patsy could do with taking the advice of the libertine Earl of Rochester, who probably cared very little for household accounting.

Instead she says: "goose down or synthetic, it isn't doing its job properly."

"You're cold? Can't have that." Patsy shifts in the bed, wraps her arm more tightly around Delia, and kisses her neck, as if to fend off the chill.

Delia thinks of the cold of the deep dark lake, then pushes it away. On that day trip, the best she could do for warmth was an old coat thrown over her shoulders. This is much preferable.

"Better", she says.

* * *

 _AN: This took an age, due to the general chaos of my life. Probably things have happened in the show by now to make this even less canonical than it was when it began (I don't know, argh). So thanks for your indulgence, your reading, and your kind reviews._


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